iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

kind of can’t believe people use Facebook, seems like such a relic

i got back in to be a little bit more in touch with family and today a cousin posted a flat earth video, for real. i haven't watched much flat earther stuff, so maybe this is a standard opening argument, but in the video, the guy was like "look at this image of the ocean from space and tell me what's wrong with it....you can't see any land there, why?", and then it cuts to his two friends/video participants, and they're like "because it's an ocean and there's no land there?", and the main guy interrupts with "watch the video. watch this. watch this." as he says that, the image of "the ocean" from space gets rotated 180 degrees, upside down, and also zooms out a bit, and you can see trees. "that's where we're filming from, the backyard. you see how easy it was to fool you? and we have almost no budget here. NASA has $65M a day to make it photorealistic."

My dad is a repeat believer in the 'facebook is limiting the number of people that can see you post to 25' hoax, and periodically asks me if its true and to explain it.

In the past I would have tried to explain its a hoax, but (admitdly belatedly) I realized he wants the hoax to be true, and wants me to confirm its true.

I confirm the hoax is true. zen ensues

I swear I see only the same five people. Maybe because they're the only ones using Facebook anymore.

I thought I'd deleted my account actual years ago now but someone told me yesterday that they'd contacted me on Messenger and I was still active. I just tried to log in to delete the fucker permanently and was told that I needed to contact three separate friends to verify me, then I could log in. Wtf.

Anyone ever had major, major problems with this miserable outfit?

In the past five months, I've had one comment and three posts removed.

1) a comment in a town tennis group about the weather: "The weather tomorrow looks very iffy. If anyone wants to play later today, let me know."

2) a post in my town's Facebook group--a group where I moderate--about a free screening of Lost in America I was having at a local community centre.

3) the same post as above, but in the Facebook group for a neighboring town (with permission from their moderators).

4) a post in a FB baseball group about all the father-son combinations Nolan Ryan has struck out.

The removals always come with the same idiotic blurb about community standards. I've tried desperately to get an explanation from someone, via both the help and support form and e-mail, but never get a response. Earlier today, I got an e-mail telling me to change my password because someone "may have accessed my account," which I counted as progress; I did, and I thought everything was fine, and now tonight I had a post removed.

I feel stupid for caring so much, but--sadly--FB is an important means of me keeping in touch with many people, and I use it for other things where I want to get word out. I'm convinced I'm going to have my account suspended without cause or explanation.

Also: does anyone know someone who works for Facebook who might actually be able to help? I'm serious. I have to believe that there are breathing, talking people somewhere who keep things running.

you can try Allyzay’s ilxmail!

I will...is that the display name, Allyzay? I don't remember anyone with that name posting.

Site been around a long time

I'll try. Checked, and has only posted twice since 2007 (in 2020). But it's worth a shot.

4) a post in a FB baseball group about all the father-son combinations Nolan Ryan has struck out.

How many have there been?

ilxor etaeoe works for Facebook Meta, I’ve harassed him recently to fix some bullshit that happened when my long-dormant account was inexplicably reactivated. Basically the only way to get customer support from Facebook is to complain to someone you know who works there. Ilx mail me and I’ll give you his phone number.

Or just go pester him in various threads until he does something about it

Oh we can just do that now? Cool.

clemenza i thought you knew her! sorry. i doubt she’d appreciate an email from somebody she doesn’t know complaining about facebook tbh.

Sorry, I already sent one out...I'll board-mail you now, silby, thanks.

Ryan struck out eight father/son combinations! TRIVIA 2020

Oh we can just do that now? Cool.

― can you still hit dinngers (gyac), Sunday, January 22, 2023 9:46 AM (thirty-nine minutes ago)

Imo if you work for Facebook you have to expect your life to get a little worse as a result

etaeoe and eeetai (used to post a lot in U.S. politics) are not the same person, are they? I had lunch with eeetai in Toronto once, ages ago.

kind of an interesting study about the motivations for clicking the "share" button, particularly bogus misinformation articles. a big chunk of people were just addicted to sharing stuff

The researchers created a mock Facebook entry for an article with a title and a graphic and showed it to users, asking them to decide whether they'd share it; the articles were evenly divided between accurate and misinformation. Overall, accurate stories were shared at a much higher rate (32 percent versus just 5 percent of false headlines). But a subset of subjects who shared the most stories—those with the strongest Facebook habit—shared fake and real stories at roughly equal rates. As a result, just 15 percent of the participants were responsible for nearly 40 percent of the fake stories that were shared.

To the researchers, this suggested that sharing misinformation isn't necessarily indicative of bias; instead, it's a problem of a subset of users who just habitually click share (with habit being defined as involving "limited reflection, inattention"). So the team designed an experiment to force people to do some reflection, asking participants to rate a headline's accuracy before they decided whether to share it (a group made these decisions in reverse order to act as a control). This worked partially. Habitual Facebook sharers reduced their sharing of false headlines but still ended up sharing a quarter of the total, and less frequent sharers were far less likely to share something false.

The researchers then repeated the experiment but used headlines that were either consistent with or opposed to the participants' self-described political affiliation (all headlines were accurate). A similar thing happened, with the non-habitual participants sharing politically palatable headlines at a rate seven times higher than contrary ones. By contrast, those with a Facebook habit were far less discerning, showing only three times the bias toward politically compatible headlines. So again, even with prompting, the habitual users were far less discriminating

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/for-facebook-addicts-clicking-is-more-important-than-facts-or-ideology/

Which would possibly explain my own problems: Russians are indiscriminately sharing my Nolan Ryan post in hopes of disrupting the 2024 election.

One thing I've seen a lot of since almost the inception of FB is friends getting ahead of family on death announcements and confusing everyone.

People shared news of my friend Di's death last year before the family had ok'd it.

Tonight, an old friend was reported as deceased and all of us began sharing condolences until we found out she had not died yet, just taken off the ventilator. Her daughter was really not happy about that.

I guess pre-social media there was the possibility of emailed rumors or phone calls but that required more effort and had no delete button.

fuck, i'm really sorry to hear about what happened tonight. both being taken off a ventilator, and the mess that you described. it's just the last thing, the worst form of bullshit, that grieving people need to deal with, especially while still processing what's happened.

It's ok. I'm more upset for her daughter. Nobody wants added weight at a time like that.

Like what a weird thing to want to post "first" about

N, based on this and other posts you have made in the past, it sound you really could get off facebook and it might be a net gain for you. Just email or text everyone you keep up with and let them know you're not going to be using that service and to contact you in another way.

Yr not wrong

I read ILX more than FB by this point

Sorry to hear about this N. (fwiw, I left Facebook under parallel circumstances in the wake of a friend's suicide. I left a "I'm not here, I'm there" message, peaced out, and am all the happier for it)

the site is getting super wonky, I don;t see notifications for comments or reacts sometimes

yeah that happens to me all the time, like i'll look and this post has two new comments and no indicator that they had arrived.

I find the sent/delivered/read icons that accompany messages--the lag time--very confusing as of late. I'll send a message to a friend who's online, and all I get is "sent." I can see where they might not read it right away, but how can it not be "delivered"?

loving this https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html

The teenaged son of a good friend of mine committed suicide last week.

My friend is feeling the tormented anguish that all of us never want to imagine. He and his ex-wife are also being very open about their grief, including the fact that the boy died taking his own life. In return, they're getting all sorts of signs of support from family, long-lost friends and perhaps even more important at this very moment, friends and parents of friends of the boy whom my friend has never met. Hearing about wonderful facets of his son's life that he wasn't even aware of.

Sounds like this is just the sort of thing where Facebook can do some good, right?

My friend and his family live in a satellite city of a Very Large American City. I googled the son's name and the city to see if an obituary had been published.

The first results were these AI-looking stories from pseudo-newspapers. "_____________ ____________ COMMITS SUICIDE". In the article, accompanied by a blurry enlarged photo of the kid, some of my friend's posts were laid out to look like he was being quoted for the story.

There's even a YouTube video showing up, that's 30 seconds long. I haven't clicked on it, but I assume it's the same type of deal.

My friend's got a public profile. You could look all this up yourself if you knew his name. So while it may be technically wrong to call this an invasion of privacy, it still feels like an invasion of something.

jesus christ

So sorry to hear, pplains

The other day an elderly relative of mine got tagged in a video post with the caption:

https://i.imgur.com/5DM6PxG.png

"Look who died in an accident I think you know him I'm so sorry"

Total bottom of the barrel clickbait and it kinda bothered me because this relative is not exactly young nor in the best health so I was arsed enough to report it.

2 days later I get a response from FB:

"Today at 8:41 AM

Your report

To keep our review process as fair as possible, we use the same set of Community Standards to review all reports.
We've taken a look and found that this content doesn't go against our Community Standards.
We understand that this might be upsetting so we recommend exploring the options available to control what you see.
You can also request a review if you disagree with the decision to not take this down."

aka "Looks good to me 👍👍 Sorry you're offended, tough shit lmao!"

Relatedly, my IG feed rarely has content from people I follow, just promoted content and viral algo trash.

Real "circling around the drain" vibes from Meta's product suite.

Hey Steve, nice to see you here.
I bounced from Facebook end of last year and I'm much less angry as a result.
Instagram is annoying af agreed, but i've convinced the feed to just send me cat pictures and paintings of dragons so it's not dancing women or people selling clothes.

Doesn’t look like this was posted here

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/19/tech/facebook-cambridge-analytica-settlement-application/index.html

Oh snap thanks. Just subbed mine.

These weird clickbait sites wouldn't go that full distance were it not for Facebook providing them the coverage.

Without FB, they'd have to settle for the page footers of news sites, where the "People With Drivers Licenses From [Your State] Eligible For Cash Settlement" links live.

But they get clicks on FB, which get clicks for FB. Why slaughter that cow if it annoys only a small group of people?

What if... *huge bongrip* the tagged person died in the metaverse and that's what the link was rightfully showing?

-meta product team

Relatedly, my IG feed rarely has content from people I follow

there's a filter for that.. tap on the Instagram logo and select 'following'

Shame you have to do that every single time though.

Just watched two couples that I'm close friends with, who previously had no beef and were very close themselves, end their friendship very publicly in an argument in a FB thread. One where one couple was pretty deliberately misunderstanding the other, even when the other was trying to point this out politely to them.

Kinda blows my mind. The only friendships I've ever insta-ended on social media were people who I didn't know well who turned out to be racist/sexist/transphobic. I could see if someone was being abusive or if there was long-standing friction that bubbled over. Or abusive

This was just one couple's insistence on hearing something the other didn't say or imply

- the extra "abusive", lol

Facebook is very accessible when you have some kind of problem. Contact them, and they will work to bring your friends back together.

I am most definitely not getting involved. I have enough to deal w in my own house lol.

Just find it interesting how many times I see this happen but it does kinda suggest the friendship wasn't as healthy as they thought it was when it does happen

The argument was over Guardians of the Galaxy

I can't even comprehend what you're saying here, please set more.